To the left: Don Cossack, Wehrmacht.
To the right: Don Cossack, Red Army.

Cossacks in WWII

Stalin, when he realized that the war with Hitler is inevitable, tried to appeal to the
Cossack's patriotism. He did it by establishing a Cossack division in the Red Army. But
being of Cossack blood was not a condition for being in that unit. There were Cossacks of
course, but it was not purely Cossack division, as a result, it could not be the same. By
the beginning of the war, there were over 100,000 soldiers of the Cossack blood in the Red
Army.

Again, like during the Civil War, Cossacks were divided. Some fought on the Soviet
side, considering that this way they fight for Mother-Russia. Some supported Germans,
hoping that they would destroy godless Stalin's state and give the Cossacks autonomy in
traditionally Cossack areas like Don and Kuban. During the war, Soviet side formed a few
Cossack units, they were not purely Cossack, they were Cossack just in name and uniforms.
At the same time many real Cossacks fought in non-cavalry units, in non-Cossack uniforms.
Stalin didn't really want the Cossack tradition to be re-born. The community of well
organized and armed people, standing up for each other was not something that bolsheviks
were willing to have in their state.

Cossacks in the Third Reich had a somewhat special status. They were not considered to
be Slavic people, and German ideologists argued that Cossacks were descended from the
Goths who used to live in the territories later populated by the Cossacks (areas north of
the Black Sea). Therefore, the Cossacks were regarded as Aryans. Since Hitler was famous
for his anty-Communism, Cossacks who emigrated to Germany after the Civil War supported
him from the very early stages. They would support anybody who was against the bolsheviks.

When the war between Germany and USSR finally broke out, those Cossacks who had to leave
after the Russian revolution sided with the Germans, since Germany was the only force at
that time confronting bolsheviks in a combat.

Most of the Cossacks fought against the bolsheviks in the Civil War. The White Army run
out in that bloody war, but the Cossacks never reconciled with the new government and new
ideology. The Soviet state suppressed the Cossack traditions, denied their right to exist
as a special entity the way they were under the Tsars - no wonder the Cossacks didn't want
to fight for the Stalin's government.

Germans tried to attract more of the Cossacks on their side. They knew too well that
Cossacks were perhaps the most prosecuted group by the communist government. Germans
managed to raise a few Cossack units from the White Army Russians who emigrated after the
Civil War, from POWs who happened to be of the Cossack ancestry, and from some volunteers
from the Cossack areas, who believed that Hitler was a lesser evil than Stalin.

Some Cossacks that were drafted in the Red Army crossed over to the German side. They
wanted to fight against the Soviets. Some Cossacks fought in the ranks of the Red Army -
those fought for Russia, not for the communists. Son of one of those who eventually ended
up on the German side (a Cossack of the Don Host) told me a story his father told him:
when supposed to go in the attack against Germans, Russian soldiers first
"accidentally" shot their Communist Political instructor (which was a sort of
ideological commander of the unit), and only after that directed their rifles towards
Nazi. The communist government and ideology were extremely unpopular and were held only by
repressive structures like NKVD (later known as KGB). It was tough to make choices then,
the situation was not black and white for the Cossacks. When in 1942 Germans advanced to
the Cossack areas of Don and Kuban, they were met as liberators by the whole stanitsa's.
People sang the anthems they were not supposed to sing under the Soviets. Men showed up
with their sabers, daggers and guns they had to hide after the Civil War, in the
traditional Cossack costumes.

The situation was very ambiguous: Cossacks wanted to fight communists, but that war
eventually turned into war against Russia, with the brutality towards the civil
population. As a result, Germans could not really use Cossacks in the Eastern Front
operations. There were hundreds of thousands of Cossacks fighting Germans in the Red Army.
At the same time, there is statistic that by 1944 there were over 250 thousand Cossacks on
the German side.

After the war, the members of the those units within the Wehrmacht were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union by the British forces (in spite of
all the promises that were given to the Cossacks), and the Cossacks were executed by
Stalin. All the senior officers were hanged, including generals Krasnov (about 70 years
old then) and Shkuro, who fought against the Red Army during the Civil War; most of the
junior officers were shot, the rest were sent to the GULAG'S, where most of them perished.
Some of those Cossacks were not even Russian citizen, they were born in emigration in
Cossack families that left the country to avoid prosecution from the communists. But the
British government helped Stalin to get rid of those who managed to escape from Lenin and
Trotsky...

Both those Cossacks who fought in the Red Army and those who fought in the Wehrmacht
had their reasons, and it's not for us to judge them now. The Cossack leaders were
dreaming of building a Cossack state - Kazakia - in the lands that were
historically theirs. They never got what was promised from the Germans, and they never got
their rights back from the Soviets.

When the war was over, Stalin didn't need Cossacks' patriotism anymore. The Cossack
uniform that re-appeared for a short period of time was gone again. Soviet Government
again returned to the anty-Cossack practices, destroying what was left of the Cossack
communities.